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Message:: [QUOTE="GDJMSP, post: 3586304, member: 112"]I'm a bit confused by the basic statement itself. First of all, with coins like these there isn't any seigniorage - on any of them, gold or otherwise. Seigniorage only exist when coins are put into circulation. This is because seigniorage is only created by the face value of the coins being greater than the value of the metal content. So if coins are not put into circulation there is no seigniorage, and it doesn't matter what the coins are made of, precious metals or base metals. My point here is that you can't purchase something that doesn't even exist. Given that, and the other info you say is found in the book such as - What this tells me is that the only reason the gold coins were able to be minted in the first place was because the marketeers agreed to foot the cost for the gold itself. If they had not, there likely would have been no gold coins. So what I think is going on is the author simply misused the word seigniorage in his comments. Now I don't know, there could be several reasons for this happening. One would be a misunderstanding of seigniorage on his part, a translation issue could be another possible reason. Yet another could be some legal technicality that only exist because of some specific Korean law on the issue. In any event it sounds to me like this is nothing more than a misuse of the word itself.[/QUOTE]